Cirk's Notebook

[Cirk]

Originally Posted by bitz 1. When a note is sended to the raid channel, the text of the note can be shown slowly line by line in the chat window. If possible, it would be very useful in the briefing note for raid.

That'd be a useful thing to have bitz, great idea!

Originally Posted by bitz 2. Search feature allowing the player to browse all the notes.

Ugh, too much work, hehe!

Originally Posted by bitz 3. List and text area can be arranged vertically. If it isn't possible, the seperating bar can be movable.

Hmmm, making the separating bar movable might be possible, I'll keep that in mind for the next release.

Originally Posted by Fin Hi Cirk, I recently saw this update note added to BugSack's SVN logs: This sounds awfully familiar. I tried installing Notebook again recently and had the same problem, and I hadn't deleted my SavedVariables yet (I'd quite like to keep a lot of those notes). Is it possible Notebook might allow the creation of strings with over 983 chars? cheers, - Fin

Hi Fin, thanks for the update. Thats an interesting thought (and well spotted). Currently Notebook allows creating notes with up to 2048 characters in them (the size that I set the editbox to), which Notebook stores as a single string, and that's always worked fine in the past for me. One thing though is that my notes always have are quite a few new-lines in them, so I wonder if having a text string greater than 983 characters with no line breaks in it might be the cause of the problem?

Oh, are you using a MAC or PC for WoW? (Wondering if this might be a bug or problem that only shows up in the MAC client - I use a PC, as do most of my guild).

If you feel adventurous, you could try editing your saved variables Notebook.lua to truncate any really long notes you have, or maybe even add in some newlines (find a note in which you've already done that to see how to format it) and see if that allows it to work properly. (Just make a copy of the original saved variables so that you can restore it if it doesn't change anything). I'd be very interested to know whether that changes anything for you or not.

Hope that helps some, and I'll keep looking at that string length thing now I have a lead

Cheers
-- Cirk

[Dridzt]

I'll add another piece of info in the same vein, just in case it's related with the corrupted / disappearing
notes I get after game patch (I've reported it a few posts back)

Originally Posted by telic I have FINALLY managed to find a solution to the crash on exit bug

In Telic's NotesUNeed Readme.txt file there's this section on problem notes:

Crash On Exit Solution ---------------------- First of all, my proof that this was a WoW bug, and not a specific NotesUNeed bug, is that copying a 'problem' note in to another Note-Taking AddOn such as NoteIt, and saving it there, would also cause WoW to crash on exit. And once I recognised the cause of the crash, then it was possible to enter completely new notes in other note taking AddOns and trigger the problem even when NotesUNeed was not installed. As I can't see Blizzard's code for WoW, its difficult for me to be exact about the cause, but after a lot of testing and hair pulling my conclusion is that WoW splits text strings being saved to the Saved Variables folder in to chunks for processing, and since WoW patch 1.10, it adds its own escape characters, and special-character substitutions. Based on my debugging of notes that would cause the problem, and minimal changes like inserting a single space which would then solve the problem, I can only believe that the WoW executable is inserting an escape character prior to the final double quotation mark of a string, effectively leaving the string un-ended, OR possibly adding an escape character to a full buffer leading it to overflow/lose a final character. Anyway, my solution has been to substitute characters that would normally be 'escaped'/substituted by WoW, before it sees them. Currently I am only substituting new-line characters, double-quotation marks, and the '\' character; Using the following 3 character pairs : ¬n ¬q ¬s As a consequence of this, users should not use these character pairs in their notes as NotesUNeed will replace them when displaying Notes. This is all done behind the scenes and users should write notes as they normally would. There is a very small chance that another type of special character being 'escaped' by the WoW executable may cause another crash. If so, just send me your NotesUNeed database, and I will ensure that I cater for that special character also.

Hoping some of it might help me get rid of the elusive "disappearing notes" problem in your Notebook.

[Cirk]

Originally Posted by Dridzt I'll add another piece of info in the same vein, just in case it's related with the corrupted / disappearing notes I get after game patch (I've reported it a few posts back) In Telic's NotesUNeed Readme.txt file there's this section on problem notes: Hoping some of it might help me get rid of the elusive "disappearing notes" problem in your Notebook.

Oo, thanks for that Dridzt, seems like a very similar problem indeed, particularly where Telic mentions "OR possibly adding an escape character to a full buffer leading it to overflow/lose a final character.", which is my current theory about what is going on. I.e., that the saved variable handling code has a fixed line width it uses for spitting out the codes and expressions, and if you exceed this buffer size, boom.

Again, I'm still thinking that using newline characters in your notes (effectively breaking the single saved variable note "string" into multiple lines in the saved file) prevents this problem, but I've not had a chance to test this myself yet.

All feedback very much appreciated, and thanks a heap guys for the detective work!

-- Cirk

[Cirk]

I've finally updated Notebook (after many requests) to WoW 2.2 and TBC in general.

In regards to the above discussions and the crashing or losing data, I've implemented long-string protection in the save algorithm (thanks to Dridzt for finding Telic's post and Fin for finding the BugSack one - I know it took me a while to follow up, but your help was still invaluable). I've also implemented a "don't save if we didn't load properly" component in there, since I've been noticing that sometimes WoW likes to send a PLAYER_LOGOUT without ever sending the previous PLAYER_LOGIN. I think that is one of the things that happens on a new patch the first time.

Bitz, I've slowed down Notebook's sending speed to 0.5 seconds per line, and limited line lengths to 80 characters, so hopefully that will go somewhat towards what you were asking for for slower sending of messages.

Phanx, Notebook now saves all its notes globally (i.e., not per-server), as requested! (It also will load any old notes, so if you still have an old SavedVariables for Notebook, you can re-instate it).

Cheers
-- Cirk

[Fin]

You're welcome! And kudos to you for fixing it in the end. I always loved Notebook.

cheers,

- Fin

[lingering]

Hiya

Great you have put the delay feature in but is it possible to make this variable or even some kind of option for mapping a key / set of characters to denote a longer pause before displaying the next line.


for example:
Blah Blah
Blah Blah Blah
%wait 5%
Blah Blah
Blah Blah Blah

Lingering

[Phanx]

Originally Posted by Cirk In regards to the above discussions and the crashing or losing data, I've implemented long-string protection in the save algorithm

It seems that now if a note is long enough to be split into multiple strings for saving, I get this error when opening Notebook:

Notebook-2.2.0\Notebook.lua:1126: bad argument #2 to 'format' (string expected, got nil)
Notebook-2.2.0\Notebook.lua:1126: in function `NotebookFrame_OnShow'
<string>:"*:OnShow":1: in function <[string "*:OnShow"]:1>
<in C code>: in function `Show'
Interface\FrameXML\UIParent.lua:1596: in function `ShowUIPanel':
<string>:"NOTEBOOK_PANEL":4: in function <[string "NOTEBOOK_PANEL"]:1>

and none of my notes are viewable. They are still saved, though, if I look in the saved variables.

Thanks for the global note change, btw! <3

[tattooedpierre]

Can I just check, I'm so used to using TinyPad but my main qualm is that it doesnt categorise my pages under headings.. I need to flick through 9+ pages to get to what I want, so this mod seems ideal.

I also, however, use TinyPad to test out LUA code. Is this in any way possible with this mod?

[Seerah]

Not to take away from Cirk's Notebook, but there is FuBar_TinyPadFu - you can select any page from the tooltip.

[Tonedef]

3. List and text area can be arranged vertically. If it isn't possible, the seperating bar can be movable.

I was thinking the same thing, but not so much the movable bit. I was thinking of something like BEQL/EQL3 http://www.wowinterface.com/download...og-WoW2.3.html

That makes things a lot easier to read quickly.

Also, do you think it is possible to add a sort of "to do" list feature that can be made to pop-up on login? Because I find that I forget to do stuff I left off doing. And if I had a reminder when I logged in my life would be just that much easier.

[Cirk]

Originally Posted by lingering Great you have put the delay feature in but is it possible to make this variable or even some kind of option for mapping a key / set of characters to denote a longer pause before displaying the next line.

Thats a great idea lingering, I'll have to think about how to include something like that...

Originally Posted by Phanx It seems that now if a note is long enough to be split into multiple strings for saving, I get this error when opening Notebook:

Hmmm Phanx, thats a puzzler, since the place that erros is coming from is completely unrelated to the way in which notes are saved! Does it happen everytime you open the Notebook page, or only when you first open it, or does it happen when you login only?

Originally Posted by tattooedpierre I also, however, use TinyPad to test out LUA code. Is this in any way possible with this mod?

It doesn't support this at the moment no, sorry

Originally Posted by Tonedef I was thinking the same thing, but not so much the movable bit. I was thinking of something like BEQL/EQL3 http://www.wowinterface.com/download...og-WoW2.3.html

I've thought about adding something like that, but just haven't gotten around to rewriting the relevant sections of Notebook.

Originally Posted by Tonedef Also, do you think it is possible to add a sort of "to do" list feature that can be made to pop-up on login? Because I find that I forget to do stuff I left off doing. And if I had a reminder when I logged in my life would be just that much easier.

I had a guildmate asking for something much the same! No promises, but it might happen one day

[DrChaos]

This thread is waaaay old but the mod still works great. I was wondering if anyone knew the location of the saved notes that was typed in?

I made 10 notes and looked in the AddOns folder under Notebook and there is no file (or any file there) that has the notes that were saved.

thanks for any help

[Dreadlorde]

They would be in the saved variables folder.

[DrChaos]

Thanks for the fast reply.

Doc

[DrChaos]

grrrr. I just spend alot of time to create 5 notes in game. I went to the saved variables folder and edited the text i made in game (its eaiser to do it out of game) and then restarted wow to see my notes and it reset back to the original "welcome" text. I've lost all the notes i created.

I created a new note in game and tried to duplicate what happened and figured out that the Notebook mod automatically adds \ and \r in the code when you hit save. It did not do that offline when i manually edited the note.e

My next questions is, Is there a program or something that i can type my notes into and it add the correct coding as needed automatically? Then i could pase it back into the saved variables file and load it like that.

basically I need to type out like 80 notes then each note would have like 5 paragraphs in it because of the limit on letter characters. But I also dont want it to delete the notes at any time.

[Dreadlorde]

If you use tinypad, there is a program called tinypadeditor. There is a link to it in the comments.

Tinypad is hosted here.

[DrChaos]

I found tinypad, but cant find tinypadeditor. Im guesing there is no standalone version? If so, I cant find it anywhere.

[Dreadlorde]

Tinypad editor is in the comments of tiny pad. It's the newest one.

[DrChaos]

Dreadlorde, you are epic! Thanks for the help with locating and fixing my prob

ty ty

Doc

[Cirk]

Note that you can also simply copy/paste into Notebook (and from Notebook into anywhere else) if you prefer to use another mechanism for writing your notes than Blizzard's wonderful built in editor

I.e., write your notes in your windows/mac text editor of choice, copy the text, alt-tab to WoW, bring up Notebook, and paste it in.

I have a few tweaks to do on Notebook, just not getting a lot of time to work on my addons at moment, and since its still working, its dropped in priority a bit

-- Cirk